Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“I have kept mine. I can still sit upon it,” She added surprisingly, “‘Rapunzel[13 - Rapunzel – персонаж немецкой сказки, девушка, заточенная в башню; она расплетает косу до земли, прекрасный принц взбирается по ее волосам в башню и спасает ее], Rapunzel, let down your hair’. Not that I could have ever let it down from a second-floor flat.”

“Aren’t you disturbed by the noise from the bar?”

“Oh no. And the bar is very convenient if I suddenly run short. I just send Wordsworth[14 - Wordsworth – Уильям Вордсворт (1770–1850), английский поэт-романтик, представитель «озерной школы»] down”.

“Who is Wordsworth?”

“I call him Wordsworth because I can’t bring myself to call him Zachary. All the eldest sons in his family have been called Zachary for generations – after Zachary Macaulay, who did so much for them on Clapham Common. The surname was adopted from the bishop not the poet.”

“He’s your valet?”

“Let us say he attends to my wants. A very gentle sweet strong person. But don’t let him ask you for a CTC. He receives quite enough from me.”

“What is a CTC?”

“That is what they called any tip or gift in Sierra Leone when he was a boy during the war. The initials belonged to Cape to Cairo cigarettes, which all the sailors handed out generously.”

My aunt’s conversation went too quickly for my understanding, so that I was not really prepared for the very large middle-aged Negro wearing a striped butcher’s apron who opened the door when my aunt rang.

“Why, Wordsworth,” she said with a touch of coquetry, “you’ve been washing up breakfast without waiting for me.” He stood there glaring at me, and I wondered whether he expected a CTC before he would let me pass.

“This is my nephew, Wordsworth,” my aunt said.

“You be telling me whole truth, woman?”

“Of course I am. Oh, Wordsworth, Wordsworth!” she added with tender banter.

He let us in. The lights were on in the living-room, now that the day had darkened, and my eyes were dazzled for a moment by rays from the glass ornaments which flashed back from every open space. There were angels on the buffet wearing robes striped like peppermint rock; and in an alcove there was a Madonna with a gold face and a gold halo and a blue robe. On a sideboard on a gold stand stood a navy-blue goblet, large enough to hold at least four bottles of wine, with a gold trellis curled around the bowl on which pink roses grew and green ivy. There were mauve storks on the bookshelves and red swans and blue fish. Black girls in scarlet dresses held green candle sconces, and shining down on all this was a chandelier which might have been made out of sugar icing hung with pale-blue, pink, and yellow blossoms.

“Venice once meant a lot to me[15 - Venice once meant a lot to me – (зд.) когда-то я была просто влюблена в Венецию]”, my aunt said rather unnecessarily.

I don’t pretend to be a judge of these things, but I thought the effect exaggerated and not in the best of taste.

“Such wonderful craftsmanship,” my aunt said. “Wordsworth, be a dear and fetch us two whiskies. Augusta feels a teeny bit sad after the sad sad ceremony.” She spoke to him as though he were a child – or a lover, but that relationship I was reluctant to accept.

“Everything go O.K.?” Wordsworth asked. “No bad medicine?”

“There was no contretemps[16 - contretemps – (фр.) помеха, препятствие]”, my aunt said. “Oh gracious, Henry, you haven’t forgotten your parcel?”

“No, no, I have it here.”

“I think perhaps Wordsworth had better put it in the refrigerator.”

“Quite unnecessary, Aunt Augusta. Ashes don’t deteriorate.”

“No, I suppose not. How silly of me. But let Wordsworth put it in the kitchen just the same. We don’t want to be reminded all the time of my poor sister. Now let me show you my room. I have more of my Venice treasures there.”

She had indeed. Her dressing-table gleamed with them: mirrors and powder-jars and ash-trays and bowls for safety pins. “They brighten the darkest day,” she said. There was a very large double-bed as curlicued as the glass. “I am especially attached to Venice,” she explained, “because I began my real career there, and my travels. I have always been very fond of travel. It’s a great grief to me that my travels now are curtailed.”

“Age strikes us all before we know it,” I said.

“Age? I was not referring to age. I hope I don’t look all that decrepit, Henry, but I like having a companion and Wordsworth is very occupied now because he’s studying to enter the London School of Economics. This is Wordsworth’s snuggery,” and she opened the door of an adjoining room. It was crowded with glass Disney figures and worse – all the grinning mice and cats and hares from inferior American cartoon films, blown with as much care as the chandelier.

“From Venice too,” my aunt said, “clever but not so pretty. I thought them suitable, however, for a man’s room.”

“Does he like them?”

“He spends very little time there,” my aunt said, “what with his studies and everything else…”

“I wouldn’t like to wake up to them,” I said.

“He seldom does.”

My aunt led me back to the sitting-room, where Wordsworth had laid out three more Venetian glasses with gold rims and a water jug with colours mingled like marble. The bottle of Black Label[17 - bottle of Black Label – (разг.) бутылка хорошего виски] looked normal and out of place, rather like the only man in a dinner-jacket at a fancy-dress party[18 - fancy-dress party – (разг.) бал-маскарад], a comparison which came at once to my mind because I have found myself several times in that uncomfortable situation, since I have a rooted objection to dressing up.

Wordsworth said, “The telephone talk all the bloody time while you not here. Ar tell them you don gone to a very smart funeral.”

“It’s so convenient when one can tell the truth,” my aunt said. “Was there no message?”

“Oh, poor old Wordsworth not understand one bloody word. Ar say to them you no talk English. They go away double quick[19 - go away double quick – (сленг) быстро смылись].”

My aunt poured out larger portions of whisky than I am accustomed to.

“A little more water please, Aunt Augusta.”

“I can say now to both of you how relieved I am that everything went without a hitch. I once attended a very important funeral – the wife of a famous man of letters[20 - a famous man of letters – (книжн.) известный писатель] who had not been the most faithful of husbands. It was soon after the first great war had ended. I was living in Brighton, and I was very interested at that time in the Fabians[21 - the Fabians – британская политическая группа, поддерживавшая идеологию и цели социализма]. I had learnt about them from your father when I was a girl. I arrived early as a spectator and I was leaning over the Communion rail – if you can call it that in a crematorium chapel – trying to make out the names on the wreaths. I was the first there, all alone with the flowers and the coffin. Wordsworth must forgive me for telling this story at such length – he has heard it before. Let me refresh your glass.”

“No, no, Aunt Augusta. I have more than enough.”

“Well, I suppose I was fumbling about a little too much and I must have accidentally touched a button. The coffin began to slide away, the doors opened, I could feel the hot air of the oven and hear the flap of the flames, the coffin went in and the doors closed, and at that very moment in walked the whole grand party, Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H.G. Wells, Miss E. Nesbit (to use her maiden name), Doctor Havelock Ellis, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald[22 - Ramsay MacDonald – Рэмси Макдональд (1866– 1937), британский политический деятель, премьер-министр (1924)], and the widower, while the clergyman (nondenominational of course) came through a door on the other side of the rail. Somebody began to play a humanist hymn by Edward Carpenter, ‘Cosmos, O Cosmos, Cosmos shall we call Thee?’ But there was no coffin.”

“Whatever did you do, Aunt Augusta?”

“I buried my face in my handkerchief and simulated grief, but you know I don’t think anyone (except, I suppose, the clergyman and he kept dumb about it) noticed that the coffin wasn’t there. The widower certainly didn’t, but then he hadn’t noticed his wife for some years. Doctor Havelock Ellis made a very moving address (or so it seemed to me then: I hadn’t finally plumped for Catholicism, though I was on the brink) about the dignity of a funeral service conducted without illusions or rhetoric. He could truthfully have said without a corpse too. Everybody was quite satisfied. You can understand why I was very careful this morning not to fumble.”

I looked at my aunt surreptitiously over the whisky. I didn’t know what to say. “How sad” seemed inappropriate. I wondered whether the funeral had ever really taken place, though in the months that followed I was to realize that my aunt’s stories were always basically true – only minor details might sometimes be added to compose a picture. Wordsworth found the right words for me. He said, “We must allays go careful careful at a funeral.” He added, “In Mendeland – ma first wife she was Mende – they go open deceased person’s back an they go take out the spleen. If spleen be too big, then deceased person was a witch an everyone mock the whole family and left the funeral double quick. That happen to ma wife’s pa. He dead of malaria, but these ignorant people they don know malaria make the spleen big. So ma wife and her ma they go right away from Mendeland and come to Freetown. They don wan to be mocked by the neighbours.”

“There must be a great many witches in Mendeland,” my aunt said.

“Ya’as, sure thing there are. Plenty too many.”

I said, “I really think I must be going now, Aunt Augusta. I can’t keep my mind off the mowing-machine. It will be quite rusted in this rain.”

“Will you miss your mother, Henry?”

“Oh yes… yes,” I said. I hadn’t really thought about it, so occupied had I been with all the arrangements for the funeral, the interviews with her solicitor, with her bank manager, with an estate agent arranging for the sale of her little house in North London. It is difficult too for a single man to know how to dispose of all the female trappings. Furniture can be auctioned, but what can one do with all the unfashionable underclothes of an old lady, the half-empty pots of old-fashioned cream? I asked my aunt.

“I am afraid I didn’t share your mother’s taste in clothes, or even in cold cream. I would give them to her daily maid on condition she takes everything – everything.”